Rants, raves (and occasionally considered opinions) on phyloinformatics, taxonomy, and biodiversity informatics. For more ranty and less considered opinions, see my Twitter feed.ISSN 2051-8188 View this blog in Magazine View.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

I've previously bemoaned the lack of a decent way to display and navigate through phylogenies. Ryen White, a graduate of Glasgow's Computer Science department and now at Microsoft Research is coauthor of of cool paper on viewing large trees in small spaces. PygmyBrowse: a small screen tree browser (doi:10.1145/1125451.1125562) describes an elegant approach to browsing a hierarchy that strikes me as being potentially very useful for navigating taxonomic classifications. It should be a cinch to implement this using AJAX (I'll let you know if I manage to do this before getting distracted by other things).